My Intel iMac arrived on Tuesday and I have been playing with it ever since. Overall it is working out really well, it is snappy when running Intel/Universal binaries and the screen quality is superb. The extra 512meg of RAM has not arrived yet so it is hard to judge performance but it is very promising. At the moment it kind of feels like you are driving a Formala One car with the tires borrowed from the family sedan, whilst Intel binaries run very nicely Rosetta is very slow especially when two or more legacy binaries are open at once. I have a feeling however that the extra RAM will help a lot with this.

A Technology Preview of Samba 4 was recently released. The primary new feature is comprehensive Active Directory support. At the moment Samba 3 is capable of joining an Active Directory domain but it cannot function as an Active Directory controller of any sort.

Nice additions to Samba 4 is a built-in LDAP back-end and Kerberos encryption that is compatible with Microsoft's version. Linux Format has an interview with Jeremy Alison, a Samba developer. He talks about the long development process that has taken place and is still to come. The Technology Preview includes a good deal of the AD server functionality but still lacks printer and security features, plus the back-end LDAP structures are in flux. Still it is pretty exciting, maybe OpenSUSE 11 will feature Samba 4....

Eclipse patch for OSX Intel: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=98889

Still waiting on Fink support. Once that arrives in the near future will be able to install developer tools like subversion, ruby, rails, php5 and openldap.

QuickImageCM is a little plugin from Pixture Studio is very handy for resizing images without having to launch a bulky image editor. It installs itself as a context menu item yet it provides a lot of functionality for quickly viewing, converting or resizing images:

With my new office space I was finding that my PowerBook was getting used less and less as a laptop. For a while I was considering getting a Mac Mini/iMac to replace it as it is two years old and sometimes a little slow. Then this week Apple announced their new iMacs based on the Intel processor. It is hard to turn down a major speed increase (my guess running legacy apps through Rosetta will still be faster than my PowerBook) plus it comes with a far better video card, more RAM, bigger hard drive and the ability to plug my 19" LCD display into the side and span screens.

I had heard the name 37signals before as they are a leading Ruby on Rails development house but I had never really thought of checking out what they were up to until this week. It turns out their Basecamp product is a very tidy project management tool with a rather large following. Feature-wise it is fairly simple and is completely centralised around the 37signals server farm (no local Intranet version). Rather than focus on email processes 37signals picks up on the blog model of posts and comments with a central (unversioned?) file repository. It appears their target audience is distributed Web developers who need a simple way to manage the comings and goings of a small group of workers.

Contrary to the title this is actually really good news because the application runs terribly on OSX. Fortunately Microsoft have replaced it with a Quicktime plugin that lets you run Windows Media files natively through Quicktime (a much cleaner solution).

Hopefully this helps the streaming of Windows Media content which for me never really worked.
Download the plugin from Microsoft's Download Centre.

The title pretty much explains everything. The SELECT form tag has a MULTIPLE option but in practice this turns very ugly very quickly. This little CSS hack provides the functionality of the tag without the user-interface nightmares.

 

The so-called 'creator of the Web', Tim Berners-Lee has a blog, it is not his own but it will be interesting to see how Mr Web 0.1 alpha finds life in the Web 2.0 environment (that is if you believe the hype and its definition). 

The guys over at the Linux Link Tech Show held a pretty good interview with Greg Mancusi-Ungaro from Novell about their Linux products. Although the interview was a little slow at times and did not start until 18 minutes into the show it still managed to cover a lot of ground.Topics ranged from OpenSUSE's growth (approximately one install every 11 seconds) through to Novell's Linux strategy and their transition from Netware. Also discussed was the KDE/Gnome debate and the rumoured (but untrue) death of the Hula project. It was also good to hear someone at Novell say they felt the SUSE CD-Rom layout was stupid, why you should need to download 5 CD's to get a working desktop is just crazy - put important things on the first two and leave the others as optional.